Sunday, March 12, 2006

The Great Pyramid

This week was supposed to be Egypt week, and we sort of forgot to post, oops. That is really inexcusable since Egypt has such a captivating history. Its history has interested me for a long time.

Egypt can boast of the only one of the seven ancient wonders to remain intact, The Great Pyramid. It is so tall that it remained the tallest structure in the world until the Eiffel Tower was built in the late 18oos. It took incredible engineering to build such a massive structure with out the use of modern mechanics, even without the use of the wheel. They needed a huge workforce to begin with. Thousands upon thousands of men were brought from all over Egypt to assist in the building of the Pharoah's tomb. Two huge ramps for hauling stone brought them about halfway up the pyramid. When they reached that point they used a smaller ramp that wound around the pyramid until they at last reached the top.

I said earlier that the pyramid remains intact, but it is not completely so. The outer casing of limestone is gone, stripped off to build medieval Cairo. That makes me reallymad. It wouldn't have looked quite so dazzling as it would have soon after it was built, but still I think it would have looked amazing.